


symbiosis

by Lasenby_Heathcote, maggief



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, CapRBB, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2019, Embedded Images, Everyone Needs A Hug, Existential Angst, Fix-It, I promise, Inspired by Art, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19130242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasenby_Heathcote/pseuds/Lasenby_Heathcote, https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggief/pseuds/maggief
Summary: Nat tells him to get a life.I will if you will, a tit for tat that will never happen, and he tries to explain to her, how it feels. Why he keeps going on mission after mission, whatever she gives him.“I'm a dead man, Nat.” Steve sighs. “A dead old man. And there’s nothing else for me, except this.”---The ghosts of a post-Snap landscape, according to Steve Rogers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lasenby_Heathcote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasenby_Heathcote/gifts).



> Thanks to the mods of CapRBB. It's been an absolute delight to take part, and you run this challenge so seamlessly, you are superheroes. 
> 
> Secondly, there are not enough thanks in the world for the amazing [Lasenby_Heathcote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasenby_Heathcote). Your art grabbed my attention from the first moment I saw it, and I knew I had to write a story for it. Thank you so much, and thanks also for being my beta as well. This fic would not exist in any way without you.
> 
> Thanks also to J, my timezone bestie who dutifully logged on at the exact moment claims opened to nab my first choice art, whilst I was sound asleep in GMT <3
> 
> Warning for depressive thoughts - Steve may not be suicidal, but he's not particularly keen on living either.

* * *

 

_“when I'm face to face with death, i’ll grab him by the neck and ask him how does it hurt?”_

 

Steve stares at the ground where Bucky used to be and he doesn’t understand. The moment hangs in the air, utterly still, feeling like his breath is suspended in his lungs as the horror dawns on him.

Thanos won.

 

——————————

_~~_ _Before_ ~~

 

“You’re going to fight me? _Really_?”

The older boy laughs at Steve, a harsh sound that echoes discordantly through the alleyway. 

Steve Rogers has never backed down from a fight, and he’s not going to start now.

 

* * * * * * 

 

His mother just sighs at him when he comes home, nose bloody, for the third time that month. Steve worries that she’s too angry, too disappointed to even scold him, but her hands are gentle as they wipe the blood from his face. She adds honey to his tea that evening, and he knows he’s forgiven. 

It’s nearly a month before he gets into another fight. This time two of the older boys are trying to get a look up Doris Halliday’s skirt. She’s not much bigger than Steve himself, despite being two years older, but the boys — they have several inches on Steve, each.

Steve doesn’t care though. He squares up against them, telling Doris to _get out of there! go!_ He’d fight the whole damn world alone if it was the right thing to do.

He’s blinking blood out of his eye, bracing for another impact that…doesn’t come.

“Hey! Go and pick on someone your own size!”

It’s another boy. Steve thinks he recognises the voice, but he can’t place it, mind foggy from the blows he’s already been dealt.

He flinches when something brushes his arm, but then a hand is gently grasping his bicep, hauling him to his feet.

“Hey pal, you okay there?”

Fingertips lightly dance along his brow, his cheekbones, soft like the wings of a bird who’s afraid to land.

“Bucky Barnes?”

Steve _does_ know the boy. They go to the same school.

“So you haven’t had all the sense knocked out of you then. If you had any to start with,” Bucky says, as his hands settle, finally, just beneath Steve’s shoulders, holding on softly.

“What do you think you were doing, huh?”

Steve’s vision clears enough for him to take stock of the boy in front of him, to catalogue the rueful smile on his face. Steve thinks he’s never seen anything more beautiful than Bucky Barnes in that moment. His mind indexes all the places they’re touching, carefully filing each single sensation away to be examined closely later.

And then—it’s as simple as that really. Bucky has Steve’s back. And a few years later, when they’re sixteen and horny and desperate for each other, he has him _on_ his back as well.

It’s easy, even when it shouldn’t be. Even when Bucky chases girls, and always tries to find someone for Steve too. When they go on double dates to keep up appearances, and _ooh that Bucky Barnes is such trouble._ Even then, Steve knows it isn’t true, knows that Bucky will be coming home to him, in the end. 

Sometimes, when Bucky’s next to him, Steve wonders what it would feel like not to fight.

He should have known then, he should have guessed, that the universe wouldn’t let him give up that easily. Steve Rogers was never destined for a happy ending.

 

——————————

~~ After  ~~

 

They head back to New York. He shaves his beard and then grows it again to hide his face. He rides the subway. It's the only thing that feels like it hasn't changed. The trains themselves are quieter, no longer the deep, familiar growl of the 30s, the ride slightly smoother. But if he closes his eyes, if he closes his eyes and forgets everything else he can almost believe that it’s 1933 and he’s riding the subway with Bucky.

Steve rides the subway to the end of the line and he thinks about Bucky. He thinks about everything he's lost, what they’ve all lost.

He paints on a smile that feels grotesque, and tells people that he’s fine. They don’t care about Steve Rogers, they don’t care about him, they care about the body, the symbol, the great hulking mass of him that’s meant to save the world. He thinks about who he used to be, that small sickly boy from Brooklyn, who never knew how to quit. Oh how he wishes he could quit now, wishes there were something that would make it worth quitting. Something worth living for.

He feels like a car that's out of gas. Freewheeling down the hill, coasting towards the end. Nowhere else to go, nothing else to do except see this through. Because what else does he have? No home, no purpose beyond war, no love. His body was literally created to wage war, and he’s done it well, brought death to many. What more is he good for?

It feels fitting that this is what he's left with, nothing but dust and ruin. Was he ever a good man? He thinks he was, once. But how many people has he killed now; how many lives has he taken? Necks snapped without a second’s thought, he’s no better than Thanos.

And this, this abject misery, the utter emptiness. This feels like just punishment for the death he has brought to this world. For the shadow of death that’s followed him across two centuries now.

He doesn’t stay in the Avengers Compound for long. After they find Thanos, find that they’re too late, that it cannot be undone, he leaves. What’s done is done.

He rents a walk-up in Brooklyn. And, Christ, is it a shit hole. Steve loves it; he feels at home between its stained walls in a way he hasn’t since nineteen forty three. Since Bucky got shipped off to war, and he followed no matter the cost.

It feels reckless in such a mundane way. That someone might come looking for Captain America in the slums of old Brooklyn, where the door doesn’t even lock properly, and the window in the living room is missing a pane of glass. Anyone could break in here if they wanted, and Steve — Steve doesn’t care. He thinks it would be an ignominious way to go, for Captain America. But what if he’s just Steve Rogers? What if he should have died in an apartment like this eighty years ago, would have if it wasn’t for Bucky? Bucky taking him in after his ma had died.

Bucky again.

Every thought he has circles back round to Bucky.

But that isn’t true.

Sam. T’Challa. Peter. Tony. Natasha. 

The living and the dead.

He thinks he should go pay Natasha a visit soon. He’ll swing by after the therapy session this evening. He hopes the meetings are doing some good for the others, those that come, because all they do for him is build up the ache in his chest, until it’s crawling up his throat, choking him.

He thinks of all the people he’s failed, how the pain of every person he meets rests on his shoulders. He thinks that maybe he’d let Thanos win, if only he could have Bucky back, if only he knew he was safe, alive. Steve Rogers has never been any better than his weakest moments. And his weakest moments all involve Bucky. He would worship at the altar of Bucky's sins, would throw it all away, even give this body back, if Bucky could live. 

And so is Steve a good man? When he'd damn everyone else for a single person? 

He thinks not.

 

* * * * * * 

 

He goes to therapy. Although, that’s not quite true. He goes, sure, but he doesn’t participate. He spouts some platitudes, claims the love of his life was lost years ago so he doesn’t have to think about what he lost in the Snap. And maybe it’s the truth, in a way, because he lost the life he and Bucky should have lived, if war hadn’t come knocking.

He goes to see Nat afterwards. Knows he owes her more than he can give. His well is empty though. He’s been giving for decades, giving every last ounce of himself to war, one fight after another. And yet still, they lost.

He doesn’t know how to do anything but fight, and so he keeps going, wherever and whenever he can.

Nat tells him to get a life. _I will if you will_ , a tit for tat that will never happen, and he tries to explain to her, how it feels. Why he keeps going on mission after mission, whatever she gives him. 

“I'm a dead man, Nat.” Steve sighs. “A dead old man. And there’s nothing else for me, except this.” 

She looks at him, shrewdly, like she understands but that she wants him to explain it anyway. Like she wants him to say the words aloud, so she can know, for sure, that he’s just like her.

“You’re not dead yet, Rogers. Why not…make the most of it?” She gestures vaguely with her hands, as it to conjure some nebulous other life for Steve, one where he’s not Captain America, one where this isn’t all his fault.  

“There's blood on this body, on this patriotism,” he replies, and he’s not sure if he’s answering her question or not. “Ain’t nothing I can do to change that.”

He’s feeling maudlin again, and he doesn’t want to drag Nat down with him. He leaves early, doesn’t stay the night and doesn’t see anyone else. He’s not even sure who’s around, or who’s off-world. He couldn’t bring himself to ask about Clint. Maybe next week. He’ll go back next week when he’s feeling better, more human, less lost inside his own mind. 

He tries not to think about what Nat had said. Could he really build a life, now? In the ruins of the world? Could he look beyond the devastation, stop remembering what was and embrace the future? It doesn’t seem possible. He can’t even imagine what that kind of future would look like, when all he can do is look at the past. What would Steve Rogers do in such a future? 

He tries going to the places he used to, back before he was Captain America, back when he was just Steve Rogers. He tries to recreate what it felt like to be himself. Who was Steve Rogers without Bucky Barnes? He feels half-wild. Unmoored. He can’t remember, or he thinks he does, and it’s not a life worth remembering. 

If he weren’t so steeped in blood maybe he could move on, he thinks.

Steve goes out on a mission. He meets up with Rhodey in rural Wales. Some Hydra leftovers camped out in the ruins of a British Army base. It’s a whole fake town built to practice close-quarters fighting, and Steve realises he’s been here before. In all the places in the world, he’s been to this small, fake Welsh town in before.

It had been when they were preparing for D-Day, preparing to infiltrate France. The higher-ups were concerned there’d be fighting within the French towns and villages, and they wanted the soldiers to be able to operate within and around the buildings, rather than the open fields, the trench warfare that had been par-de-course so far.

The Howling Commandos had been dispatched to help run the operation. To provide a sort of special forces oversight to the training exercise. To act as the faux-enemy for the hapless new recruits being trained, eighteen year olds too young to fight when the war had started, being drafted now in times of desperation. 

The Howlies hadn’t taken the commission seriously. They’d taken great delight in sneaking up on the soldiers trying their best to remain quiet. They’d set small booby traps — not enough explosives to actually _harm_ anyone, but enough to give them a fright.

Steve and Bucky had snuck off under the cover of darkness, hidden themselves away in one of the houses on the outskirts, far away from where the rest of the Howlies were keeping everyone entertained. Oh they knew, they knew what their CO got up to with their Sergeant. No one had ever said anything, not even amongst themselves, but Steve had seen that look sometimes pass between them. Men all sharing the same secret, and keeping it just the same.

Steve remembers that now. As he fights with Rhodey. He likes the other man, trusts him to have his back in a fight, but it’s not the same. It’s not that silent solidarity that only war can create.

Although if this isn’t war, it certainly isn’t living either.

After they’re done (and what’s a few more bodies to the blood on his conscience now?), relaxing in the sunshine waiting for a pickup, Steve wonders if there’s any Welsh superheroes, or if there were, did they survive the Snap? He amuses himself thinking about Captain Welshman, The Iron Sheep, and he shares these thoughts with Rhodey. Fresh from the adrenaline of the fight, and the endorphin-relief of victory, they end up laughing so hard there are tears in their eyes. When Steve laughs, it feels good, like there’s some tiny piece of the real him underneath it all, underneath Captain America. Still there, still breathing perhaps. Not completely without hope. He wonders how much longer that piece of him can survive, if it’s really even there.

He heads back to see Nat again the next week. Catches the tears in her eyes from when she was alone. His heart breaks for her and he wishes he could offer some comfort. What does he have though? This body built for war, and a small angry Brooklynite lost somewhere inside.

“We tell people to move on. But not us.” He feels better, almost, admitting to his hypocrisy. That’s honest, at least, even if it’s not healthy. 

He'll never move on from this, though. How can he? But he's done, he’s empty. He's been giving and giving, to Shield, the SSR, the Avengers. They've been taking from him for years, decades. He did his duty and they've taken everything, everything except his life even though he tried to give that too.

It feels like the death of duty now. He’ll keep fighting, because that’s what Captain America does, that’s what Steve Rogers used to do. But only because he has nothing else left, nothing left to lose.

And then…hope. Hope in the form of Scott Lang, and a plan. Steve wonders if this is a sign from the universe, a redemption. He doesn’t have to move on because they can change the past, they can go back.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that, once he finally understands what’s possible. They can’t go _back_. They can’t erase the last five years and, as Tony begs, they’re not going to even if they could. Morgan’s not the only child who’s been born in the last five years, and Steve’s not callous enough to kill them all.

He wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to have a child. To have this tiny person so dependent on him, so trusting. Where his brute strength would do nothing more than cradle them while they slept, while they cried. He wonders if his hands could do such a delicate task, or if this body bred for war wouldn’t know its own strength.

He thinks that life isn’t for him. Even with Peggy he couldn’t imagine that life for himself. Steve Rogers, maybe, but not Captain America. And Steve Rogers is gone. He’s the dead man living inside this body now.

 

——————————

~~  _Then_ ~~

 

Steve isn’t sure how much he’s got left. His shield is broken, his body too; bloody, but unbent, unbowed. He’ll fight the world alone if he has to, and maybe it’s come down to it now. He used to think he’d be angrier than this, at the end, the anger was the only thing keeping him going when he was small and looking to pick a fight with anyone who’d listen.

Now, he feels resigned, at ease. Face to face with death, at last, his time has come. But he can’t give up yet, not while there’s still life inside his body. Steve Rogers has been fighting since the day he came kicking and screaming into this world, and he’s not about to stop now. 

The weight of Mjolnir in his hand had been a surprise though. He’d thought, perhaps, with all the blood on his hands, his soul, that he wouldn’t be worthy, not anymore. It had been desperation that led him to try. A last-ditch attempt to do something, _anything,_ to help stop the tide of Thanos and his army.

He’d almost cried. A brief sob suppressed back down inside when the hammer had heeded his call. He’d suspected, once, but to have it confirmed, here, now. Christ, it was…it was peace. He’s ready. He’s ready to die, for Captain America to die, taking Steve Rogers with him once and for all.

But he’s not going down without a fight.

He tightens the strap on his arm, tourniqueting the wound there, and faces Thanos. 

And then—

“On—- eft.”

Static.

… “On your left.”

His left—?

The relief that sweeps through him is so palpable it feels like a blow. He feels dizzy with it. 

Sam.

As he turns to look for him, he realises, it’s not just Sam. It’s — _everyone_.

It worked, they're alive.  He doesn’t have to face down the end alone, after all.

He can’t shake the feeling that a weight has settled on his shoulders, though, rather than been lifted. He was about to die. He would have been allowed to stop fighting, to just — to just be nothing, nothing at all.

His life is an obligation that he does not own. 

 

* * * * * * 

 

Alone later, the cuts and bruises already stitching themselves back together, Steve Rogers weeps. 

 

——————————

~~  _Now_ ~~

 

He would have done it, he would have faced down Thanos with nothing but a broken shield. But this? He's done his time. He's paid his penance. He's shown he's worthy and he can't go on. He can't do this anymore when it feels like he can't breathe. When it feels as if he hasn't taken a deep breath since he sank the Valkyrie into the ocean, like the ocean water had filled up his lungs and never let him go, the cold catching in his throat. 

He hasn't taken a breath in eighty years and he just wants to let go. He wants to exhale. He feels like he’s been carrying the real Steve Rogers — the small, bony Steve Rogers — inside this huge body for the last eighty years, but now…now it feels like he’s not there anymore. There’s nothing left. Steve has been worn down to the bone and it feels like only the effigy of Captain America remains in his place.

He feels like he’s already dead. And there’s nothing but this place marker, this symbol, that remains.

 

 

The world is safe. And if something comes along he knows that Sam can handle it, Bucky can handle it. And — Bucky. There's that feeling again, like he can't catch his breath and it feels like asthma, it feels like a boa constrictor wound around his rib cage, squeezing his heart.

Bucky will be fine without him. 

But Steve? Steve will finally drown if he stays.

 

* * * * * * 

 

Steve Rogers has never backed down from a fight, and he knows that’s why he has to go. He can’t go on like this, can’t go on fighting. He’s given everything, and there’s nothing left for him to give. This world doesn’t want his life, even though he’s tried to give it. 

Bucky’s here, Bucky’s alive, he’s safe and surrounded by people who’ll keep him safe and sane.

Steve Rogers is trouble. Steve Rogers has been stalked by death since forty three, and he won’t drag Bucky down into that anymore.

He’ll stay in the past. He’ll stay where he can’t do any damage, where he knows the fights are taken care of, where he knows the future will turn out alright. He’ll go to the past and absolve himself. Of his sins, and of the fight. He can leave Captain America behind, shed that skin like an old, tired snake and slither under a rock. Some cool, dark place where no one will find him. Maybe there he can rediscover who Steve Rogers is; who lies beneath Captain America, or what’s left of him, at least. 

Saying goodbye in the morning is…it’s not possible, he thinks, wildly. How can he say goodbye? How can he sum up the past ninety years into one farewell? An image flashes into his mind, of Bucky, grey-haired and wrinkled, Steve right there by his side. But he shakes his head and the fantasy is gone. That isn’t the life for them, that’s not the ending they’ll get. Steve’d be dead long before his hair would turn grey. 

He hugs Bucky, and he knows — of course he knows — and Christ, Bucky smells like home, like everything good that’s ever happened to Steve. He stays there for a moment, breathes in Bucky’s neck, once, twice, before he’s able to let go.

The familiar words come out, but it feels like he’s choking on them. Bucky smells like home, but there’s no place for Steve here, not anymore.

He steps onto the platform, picking up Mjolnir and the briefcase, and then he’s gone.

Steve Rogers is done fighting, after all.

 

* * *

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_“give my gun away when it’s loaded. is that alright with you?”_

 

~~  _Now_ ~~

 

Bucky Barnes has never been able to stop Steve Rogers from doing something, not once he’d set his heart on it. That bull-headed pig-stubbornness is something that Bucky has come to love over the century that’s passed between them. Even when it frustrates him half to hell and back. 

When Bucky sees the look in Steve’s eyes, he knows. He _knows._

Bucky’s always been able to read right through Steve, from that very first day in the alleyway, when Steve had sworn he was fine, about to win in fact — _I had ‘em on the ropes, Barnes!_ Bucky can tell from the slightest cue on Steve’s face what he’s thinking or planning. So when he sees Steve the night before he’s due to return the stones, he knows, alright, he’s not an idiot.

And it should hurt. It should cut deep, it should feel like a thousand paper cuts right across his heart. And it does, of course it does. But Bucky looks into Steve eyes and he sees a dead man. There’s no life there, no joy, no love. Just sorrow, and pain. Bucky loves Steve more than his own life, and when he sees that look in Steve’s eyes, the pain reflected back feels so visceral Bucky wants to vomit.

So he can’t argue with Steve’s choice. Not when he looks over at his friend — his lover, his _life partner_ across every lifetime, this one and the next — and sees only a dead man staring back.

Bucky Barnes knows exactly what Steve Rogers is planning on doing, and he lets him do it all the same. Because Bucky Barnes has always had Steve Rogers figured out.

Until, he doesn’t.

Banner is shouting something about Steve missing his mark, and _sure pal,_ he thinks, because he knows what’s happening. But then—

He’s there.

There’s no briefcase, no Mjolnir, but he’s carrying the shield, and he looks, healthy, calm. Bucky can’t really tell if he looks older at all, although he’s let the beard grow back in. It’s Steve though, there’s no doubting it.

It’s _Steve._ And Bucky can’t breathe. 

 

——————————

~~  _Later_ ~~

 

Steve hands off the shield to Sam and, although he makes a point of not eavesdropping, he can guess at what’s being said. There’s a new Captain America now, and Bucky thinks that maybe it’s a good thing. He wonders if he can still fight at Captain America’s side, if that would be okay, because he thinks that might be where he belongs. His ledger’s still in the red, as Nat would say, he’s still got some fighting left to do.

Steve though, Steve is done, it seems. And Bucky doesn’t know what that means for the man who never could back down from a fight.

“I thought you were gone. For good.” Bucky doesn’t pretend like he didn’t know.

“I wanted to be. I’d planned on it. The past, seemed so much simpler. I thought—“ Steve blows out a breath, the air ruffling Bucky’s hair from how close they’re sitting. They’re alone in a house on the edge of the Avengers compound, exposed to the air and one wall in ruins, saved from destruction just barely.

“I thought that I could find myself there. Who I used to be. Before the fighting, before the war, before this body.” Steve gestures at himself helplessly, as if he could separate his mind from his body.

Bucky almost laughs. “You were a fighter long before that body, pal.” It’s meant to be a joke, something light-hearted, but the words sink between them like a stone.

It’s true. Steve’s never been anything but a fighter. And he doesn’t know how to say these next words, doesn’t even know what they mean, not really.

“I’m done fighting, Buck. That’s why I wanted to leave, so they couldn’t make me. Nothing good ever came from war.” Steve looks away, and Bucky is sure those are tears forming in his eyes.

“Nothing good?” Bucky’s angry now. “Nothing? You were just gonna let the Nazis win then? Hydra? Or what about poor Doris Halliday? You think she wasn’t grateful that day?”

“War begets war, Buck. You know that as well as I do.” Steve can hear the judgement in his own voice, wonders if Bucky can too, if he understands what Steve means. He can’t bring war anymore, he can’t leave anymore death in his wake.

“Screw that. We’re the ones who stop that. Who stop it from getting worse.” Bucky’s voice is rising, because he’s angry at Steve, angry at him for giving up.

“Stop it from getting worse? Tell that to all the people who died. All those innocent bystanders that we helped kill with our war.” Steve is on his feet now, pacing. Hands twisting in and out of his hair like he’s about to pull it all out at the roots. “What about Natasha? And Tony! Christ, Tony. I made him come back for this fight. He was out, done. And now he’s dead.”

He’d thought he’d had nothing left to lose; how wrong he’d been.

“That’s not on you, pal,” Bucky replies, and he wants to grab Steve, shake him. But he looks more delicate now than when he was ninety pounds soaking wet, and Bucky’s afraid to touch him.

“That’s not on you,” he repeats, as he softly encircles Steve’s wrist with his flesh and blood hand.

Steve takes a ragged breath, hides his face. “I know,” he chokes out, and Bucky can hear the sob buried there, the tears, “I know, and that’s why I can’t do it anymore. This fight’s not for me, not anymore.”

And Bucky gets it—he does—this is why Steve had wanted to leave. To take himself away from the fight, to stop himself from being able to get involved. He wonders why it didn’t work though, wonders why he didn’t stay.

Bucky Barnes doesn’t have the courage to ask Steve Rogers why he came back.

Instead he stands up. He asks with the soft curl of his arms around Steve, of a gentle press of lips and hands, tongues and bodies. He asks Steve to accept him with the hard planes of his body, a dance they perfected nearly a century ago, but that still feels new every time. 

He presses Steve down onto the floor in this damaged house. One wall blown off and dust everywhere, the upper floor open to the air, stairs leading nowhere. He thinks about a similar house, a lifetime ago in Wales. He offers himself to Steve in the shell of this house, just like he had then, and he tries not to think of metaphors. He tries not the think of the shell of Bucky Barnes that became the Winter Soldier, or the shell of the Soldier that houses him now. He tries not to think about Captain America, carrying the lifeless memory of Steve Rogers, that small punk that got left behind in the forties. He doesn’t have to fight the world alone, not anymore. 

They lie there in the aftermath, bodies cooling, muscles and heartbeats realigning to each other. A symbiosis. 

Bucky’s just about dozed off when Steve speaks. 

“I just— I remembered.”

Steve seems content to leave it there, as if that’s explanation enough. An answer to the question that Bucky hadn’t dared to ask. Steve is at peace with his choice, knows that there are so many people fighting in the here, the now. Not just Bucky and Sam, the other Avengers doing the heavy-hero lifting, but the everyday people. Every single person fighting for what’s right, and knowing that things are so much _better_ now than there were in the past. If Steve were being selfless, it’s those people that he’d credit with his decision not to stay, knowing he could take a back seat in the present but also know that the mantle hadn’t been dropped. But that’s not what he tells Bucky, not the real reason at the end of it, why he couldn’t stay there.

“Remembered what?” Bucky rouses himself enough to ask.

“That there’s no life worth living for Steve Rogers, without Bucky Barnes.”

It sounds stupid. To talk about themselves in the third person. But the words hit Bucky like a blow to the stomach. He feels the air leave his lungs like he’s been sucker punched, because, was it really so simple? It feels like it, to him, sometimes. But they’ve both been through so much along the way, both grown so much from that alleyway in nineteen thirty, that it often felt like it could never be that simple again. That they were two lines on a graph, starting at the same point but forever diverging, getting further and further apart until—until one goes to live in the past and the other stays in the future.

But they’re both here. Steve is real, and warm, and _alive_ beneath his fingertips. Alive in a way that Bucky hasn’t seen in decades, not really. 

Bucky Barnes turns to look at the man lying next to him, and he doesn’t see Captain America. He doesn’t see a soldier, or a warrior, a leader or a visionary. He sees Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers in every iteration, from small and sickly, to tall and strong. He sees Steve, just Steve, always Steve.

And he’d follow that punk anywhere, all the same.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently I couldn't resist another Endgame fix it. This is my life now.
> 
> The Army training base is real, it's just outside Sennybridge in Wales and it's a strange strange place.
> 
> If you liked it, please leave a comment or come visit us on tumblr. We're [iameverywhere](https://iameverywhere.tumblr.com/) and [Lasenbyphoenix](https://lasenbyphoenix.tumblr.com/) :)


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